What Is API?
Application Programming Interface or API refers to the software mechanism that permits two software components to communicate with each other using a set of definitions and protocols. In addition, this is a contract of service between two applications and this contract defines how they communicate with each other using requests and responses. APIs work in four different ways which are as follows:
- SOAP APIs- They use Simple Object Access Protocol and are less flexible API that was more popular in the past. They use an XML data format to declare their request and response messages.
- RPC APIs- These are Remote Procedure Calls. It includes a client completing a function on the server, and the server sending the output back to the client.
- WebSocket APIs- It is a modern web API development that uses JSON objects to pass data. Furthermore, it supports two-way communication between client apps and the server.
- REST APIs- They are highly flexible APIs found on the web today. In it, the client sends requests to the server as data and the server uses this input to start internal functions.
Why API Testing is Important?
It is a highly significant practice that ensures that your API performs as expected when it faces a wide variety of expected and unexpected requests. Apart from just APIs functionality, it also tests the reliability, performance, and security of API. Furthermore, it narrows down the probabilities of defect detection at a later stage and reduces overall testing costs.
Introduction to Postman Tool
To begin with, Postman is an API development tool useful for building, testing, and modifying APIs. It allows you to write functional tests, integration tests, regression tests, and more. In addition, it provides a platform for building and using APIs and simplifies each step of the API lifecycle along with streamlining collaboration.
Features of Postman Tool
Postman offers an API that allows you to programmatically access data stored in your Postman account. In addition, it helps in performing all the classic CRUD operations on your collections, environments, mocks, and more. Moreover, its Postman Echo feature acts as a sanity checker and learning tool that allows you to test your REST clients and make sample API calls. It allows you to send requests through various protocols, explore different authentication methods, and play around with different parameters. Furthermore, it comes with build in libraries that are available to use in the Pre-request and Test script tabs. These libraries provide functionality not necessarily built into JavaScript. To further know about it, one can visit Postman Online Training. Apart from these, given below are some of the features of the Postman Tool.
- Collaboration Features- It offers easy collaboration and allows users to comment, branch, pull requests, tag, and more. Moreover, it makes working together easier and offers a multiplayer experience with shared workspaces.
- Monitors for Regression Testing- These monitors allow you to stay up to date with the health and performance of your APIs. Furthermore, they give you the status of your tests and allows you to test against a multitude of scenarios throughout the day.
- Built-in GraphQL Support- Postman supports GraphQL variables and allows sending GraphQL queries in the request body as POST requests. Furthermore, it provides query autocompletion with user-defined GraphQL schemas.
- Collection and Share- This tool allows you to save related API endpoints into a collection and share the entire collection with other developers. After getting the collection link, they can import the collection and continue the work.
Benefits of Using Postman Tool
Postman provides you with a user-friendly interface and allows you to send a simple request by only entering it, filling in the necessary headers, and selecting the HTTP method. In addition, it also offers you code snippets that are examples of validations for response code and response time. It facilitates automation and allows you to easily set up tests using the Postman API testing tool.
Moreover, it helps you in automating your test cases in JavaScript with impressive features like writing test suites, building requests, passing on data, etc. This allows you to aggregate tests and requests into a single automated test sequence. Furthermore, this tool ensures cost-effectiveness and you can use it in its free plan, which consists of helpful features. Its paid version offers high-end features and it is also very pocket friendly. There are many Postman Training Institute in Delhi and one can enroll in them to start a career in it. Apart from these, given below are some of the benefits of using Postman.
- Effective integration with systems
- Comfortable business logic implementation
- On-the-fly testing
- Provides many useful scripts
- Comes with tons of resources
- Easy move to code repositories
- Ensures easy Creation of test suites
- Is capable of running tests in different environments
- Facilitates data storage for Multiple tests
Conclusion
Postman is an API development tool useful for building, testing, and modifying APIs. It comes with various collaborations and allows users to comment, branch, pull requests, and tag. Furthermore, it offers monitors for regression testing that provides you with the latest update on the health and performance of your APIs. Postman has a user-friendly UI and it allows you to automate your test cases in JavaScript. Moreover, it comes with a free plan that consists of limited but useful features. In conclusion, it provides many useful scripts and comes with an easy move to code repositories.